In a data center that utilizes virtualization, hardware failure is the cause of application downtime about twenty percent of the time, when compared to other failures, such as user error and software component failure. Further, at the enterprise level, hypervisor-based hosts are impacted by storage and network outages more than any other outage, including degradations of protection. As such, hardware failure is an area of concern for infrastructure/server/VI administrators when virtualizing.
In addition, the impact of a hardware failure (i.e. server or I/O connectivity loss) increases as the number of virtual machines and datastores per host increases. As such, hardware failure has a direct attributable negative impact of virtualizing. Thus, with higher consolidation ratios, failures impact more virtual machines and, as a result, customers stop consolidating, reduce the capital expenditure benefits of virtualizing, and/or keep their key applications on physical infrastructure to ensure they get the desired level of protection. Thus, due to the high visibility of infrastructure outage to a virtualized infrastructure and in order to raise customer confidence, it is important to be able to protect against hardware outages.